The dream to know everything about everyone
Affordances of commercial data systems and digital net-widening in policing
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6458440 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Katerina Hadjimatheou (0000-0002-6848-7244, University of Essex), Pete Fussey (0000-0002-1374-7133, University of Southampton) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 29 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 325-345 |
| Publication date | 2025-05-07 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Theoretical Criminology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1362-4806 • E-ISSN: 1461-7439 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/13624806251334954 |
| OpenAlex | W4410176021 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 22 |
This article empirically analyses the use of new commercial integrated data systems in policing. We examine the impact of one of the most widely used commercial systems in the United Kingdon, through observations of platform use and in-depth interviews with users across ranks and strategic, tactical and operational roles; and across specialist units including criminal intelligence, ‘county lines’ organised crime and victim safeguarding. Drawing on analytical tools science and technology studies, our analysis nuances Cohen's seminal concept of net-widening by examining how digital policing is predicated on complex police–commercial relationships. We show how the data system itself generates affordances that drive insatiable data collection, transforms mundane encounters into surveillance opportunities, revalorises mundane information as intelligence, reconfigures the meaning of suspicion and disrupts the temporalities of policing itself. These undermine increasingly fragile principles of police legitimacy and due process, and raise concerns around transparency and accountability in policing
Affordance · Computer security · Dream · Human–computer interaction · Internet privacy · Media studies · Net (polyhedron · Sociology · Computer Science · Crime Patterns and Interventions · Cybercrime and Law Enforcement Studies · Privacy, Security, and Data Protection · Psychology
Quantum Mind and Social Science
The Rise of Big Data Policing
Theorizing data analysis platforms – digital refractions and reconfigurations of pasts, presents and futures
The Government of Things
Electronically Monitored Punishment
Reassembling the Social
What's New About the "New Surveillance"? Classifying for Change and Continuity
The rule of law and the political economy of criminalisation
Questions of security
The New Jim Crow
Assisted’ facial recognition and the reinvention of suspicion and discretion in digital policing
Predictive Policing and the Politics of Patterns
A thousand plateaus
The Division of Expert Knowledge in Policing and Security
The Postmodern Condition
The Mangle of Practice
Politics of prediction
Digitizing Sociology
Technologies, Texts and Affordances
| Highly cited | No |
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